It continues.

(blog long gone from myspace, it turns out) 

But the blog abides. 10 years old today! Big old "Best Of" to follow. Here's a little song and dance in the meantime:

Explore a world without light.

Sir Henry: "Do you have a torch?"

Watson: "No. I've got a gun."

Sir Henry: "Is it also a torch?"

Watson: "No. It's just a gun."

 That's Shaun Chambers as Sir Henry Baskerville. Shaun's lovely dad, John, came over to see the show a few days ago. John's a carpenter and musician, he toured Ireland back in the seventies and eighties and the night before the election we sat in the Four Corners at the intersection of Seilerstrasse and Zeil 10 while Shaun and he shared anecdotes about the Irish amateur dramatics groups they used to play with. Maybe "memories" is a better word than anecdotes: a man onstage rummaging around endlessly in a bag of bottle tops to find the single florin, that kind of thing. It might have held up the show, I said, but I thought it added verisimilitude because I'm always rummaging around in my leather pouch for euros in the Aldi.
"Have you been to Ireland?" John asked me.
I told him about the one time I'd been to Belfast touring "Ring", and how weirdly like a boarding school I'd found it.
"Oh it's better than it was," he said and went on to describe being in a Catholic band touring Protestant clubs north of the border: You didn't stay for drink. You didn't so much as look at the women. You were shepherded to the stage and then you were out, and when you were out, there was no light, because the street lamps round the clubs were all dark. I asked him why. John said the club owners had put them out. I asked him how. He said "You know," and mimed a gun. Oh yeah.
It was terrifying back then, John said. Once, he had found a bullet on the floor of his car after giving a friend a lift. "If I'd been stopped, and that bullet had been found...
"And the man I was telling you about, the man with the the bottle tops..." The actor searching for the florin, yes. He was killed, John said. He'd come home one evening to be shot in the head. "And he had no links with any paramilitaries. None. They were just killing Catholics... And these were soldiers doing this. British soldiers. Listen... The Glenanne Gang... Google it when you get back. Glenanne Gang."
I did. He's not wrong. Still it was worth it, I guess, to have the DUP now sitting in the House of Commons. DERP!
John loved the show by the way.

Where I Was Way Wrongest (or: Wonderful, Wonderful Confirmation Bias)

I'm trying to make another film on my phone but the bits keep slipping about, I've been having the same problem putting subtitles on "Jonah" as well, it's quite disheartening, like that moment in childhood when you finally realized the adhesive limits of a Pritt Stick, but WHO CARES because we had a general election and everything's suddenly bearable again! PHEW, RIGHT?!!!*  

 

 6:09am, June 9th, Frankfurt

 

 Well, we saw. (Links to cautiously optimistic article about Corbyn from two years ago). And I'm very glad I got all of this out of my system before the results came in because it's worth remembering just how dark things looked. (Links to cautiously pessimistic article about Corbyn from two days ago). But didn't I say! "Do your job, focus on the facts, convince through competence, smile, be courteous, and let the Right go mental and out themselves." See! I said! And here's the thing: Maybe this is where the wave breaks, but I can't really see how. If the Tories aren't seen as strong then what are they? There can't be a more towering proof of their incompetence than the calling of this election. I'm not going to blame the results on the campaign however, Trump had a dumber campaign and won. "How good a campaign is" can only be judged on the result, it's a conclusion, not an explanation. Alex has a better explanation:

I think that that Ariana Grande concert helped too.
  

 * Disclaimer: Of course the prospect of the Right unmasked and mental is still terrifying and, facing the possibility of a deal with the DUP, we now have to man the walls against a wave of batshit thicker than anything we've yet seen, but I don't think this will be a tsunami, and the walls seem a lot stronger than they did three days ago. That's where I was wrongest: I don't think we're headed for a civil war now. Not on the mainland at least. We seem saner today, less frightened. A lot of commentators have been bemoaning the loss of a centre in British Politics but I think they're dead wrong, and I think the reason they're dead wrong is the same reason they've been dead wrong about this in-one-sense-unnecessary-but-in-another-absolutely-necessary election all along. Joel finally put his finger on it:

Days of National Humiliation

"It's not the despair, Laura. I can stand the despair. It's the hope." Clockwise

 It's not really though, is it? As I write this, the polls are still open, but the Conservatives don't appear to be breaking a sweat, and the odd engagements I've had with Tory voters on twitter have given me very clear hints why Blair and co. thought it such a good idea to rename the party: for so many in Britain, the very word "Labour" is bafflingly, deafeningly toxic. Back at Tory HQ meanwhile, following the example of Trump, the Conservatives have learnt the best way to win at Democracy – as with Global Thermonuclear War – is simply not to play. Instead, attack human rights as enablers of terrorism, attack the judiciary as "enemies of the people" and, fuck it, attack the very principle of opposition as a tedious attempt to "frustrate the will of the people". I almost included attack the media as discredited pests, but of course both sides have done their share of that, with the odd honorable exception. And Christ, that clip was hard to find! Googling "Corbyn defends press" gets you three pages of Corbyn instead attacking it. Someone should write a strongly worded letter to Google's offices, that'll fix it. 

 I am voting Labour, you might not be surprised to read. I've even made the odd campaign contribution, although I actually left the party, almost a year ago, after it backed Brexit. Watching Corbyn's performance during this campaign, however, I get it now: voting is sacred to him. That's why he never stood down having won that vote, why he backs Brexit, why he rebelled so often while voting as a backbencher while producing such a coherent manifesto, and why he refuses to consider any further "deal-making" to form a coalition. He has clearly always believed that a vote is a genuine expression of the self, and that a democracy must honour those expressions. Well, good for him, I suppose. It's proved a pretty strong platform this past month. And we'll see. But the attempts at uniting a country have come and gone. Even the campaign slogan "For The Many, Not the Few" foreshadows, a little too strongly, some incoming civil war, and only the Right benefits from division. As I'm sure I wrote elsewhere – although I can't find that now either – I've always preferred the motto of the London Olympics' Opening Ceremony:

 And I remember* John Oliver once made this observation about the elections in Egypt: "Under a dictatorship you get used to a dictator kicking you in the balls. Under a democracy you have to get used to half your own population kicking you in the balls." I'm not sure it's google-able, you'll just have to take my word for it. I'm still in Frankfurt. I only know what happens on social media. I think my friend Gemma's in Stratford now. She's making a show about the Civil War. She's been researching it for years. Fun fact: one of Oliver Cromwell's big ideas once he came to power was to replace Holidays with "Days of National Humiliation". Nobody thought there'd be a civil war before then either, she told me. Sides just became too entrenched.

"Oh well..." a sign in Frankfurt.

* and, it turns out, have already blogged about...

Me at the zoo

"And now, Watson, it only remains for us to find out by wire the identity of the cabman, No. 2704, and then we will drop into one of the Bond Street picture galleries and fill in the time until we are due at the hotel."

 One of the excellent things about reading Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes is how positively it affects your time-keeping: Holmes' energy is contagious, he clearly loves living in London and he knows how to use it – the city is his Bat-belt. I'm currently not in London, however. I'm in Frankfurt, playing an Obelicised Watson in a "Hound of the Baskervilles", and using neither the city nor my time here nearly as effectively as SH (I've been here a month so far. I've heard a lot of podcasts in bed). But now that we have a week off I thought I should mark it somehow, so I started reading the book, as I said, and it's clearly put some baking soda up my aft, because yesterday I actually went to the zoo.

It was terrifying.

 

 And I then I made my first film on a phone. And here it is. Good old blog. We must catch up. In the meantime, here is a sustained invasion of privacy:

 Yes. Something escaped.

"Here are some phrases..."

  This is me trying to transcribe an audience's reactions to a show I performed nine years ago, a promenade version of Jonah Non Grata at the Shunt Lounge: Is that someone saying "This is an asshole of a night" 40 minutes, 40 seconds in? I can't be sure. I might leave that bit out. It's tricky. What sounds like "Good question" on one cheap set of headphones turns out to be "Is it Russian?" on another, and if anyone can tell me what I'm saying 22 minutes and 28 seconds into this, please let me know, or I'll just have to go with "I've discovered a new version of ham" which it definitely isn't.

 But it's a surprisingly creative procrastination exercise. Initially I just wanted to subtitle the video using youtube's CC function because so much of it was inaudible (and because it beat writing something new), but the subtitles seem to be taking on a nice life of their own now, and something new seems to be making itself. Of course it might just seem like that because subtitles immediately make something look more like a documentary, or it might seem like that simply because I've spent nearly a week staring at the thing, but so much of the show concerned the reading or repeating of text - phrases in a foreign accent, instructions, hymns, Ian Livingstone's "City of Thieves" - that it seems apt to see this text finally take centre stage. Subtitling also means that any audience murmur I can make out also becomes part of the text now. An unpleasantly fraught audience relationship has become an engaging dramatic narrative. You could never do this in the live show. This is the book. It's almost like a comic. Finally. And the fact that so many of the words are inaudible might actually be helping that transition. Words and pictures.

 I still haven't made a decision about Edinburgh though, obviously. This transcription is what I'm doing instead. I'll let you know when I've finished, but in the meantime here's the test piece I did a few weeks ago. I say "test piece" but I don't know who or what I was testing, maybe just people's capacity for attention.

 

Scissor Sisters

Where we are right now.